The award-winning Australian’s deconstruction of the novel form is a rich pleasure

Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel, her first since the Folio prize-winning Scary Monsters, opens conventionally enough. We’re introduced to an Australian geologist, who is travelling in the pristine Swiss Alps of the late 1950s. Against an idyllic backdrop of “chalets, cows, ice-blue lakes, hillsides of coloured flowers”, he considers the beginnings of an infatuation with a Spanish music teacher, and recalls a childhood visit to his grandmother’s farm, during which his theft of a ring was blamed on a “native” housemaid. There’s a strong sense of place; of character and character flaws; of a plot that’s pleasurably thickening. The stage is lullingly set.

And then, abruptly, De Kretser marches out and dismantles it. Fictional mid-20th century Switzerland gives way to something close to factual present day; De Kretser shifts into the first person, and launches into a crisp description of her critical engagement with a 2021 London Review of Books essay on the application of situationist theory to an Israeli military raid that killed 70 people. After reading that essay, she explains, “experiences I’d had, over time, with theory and practice came into my mind … As I recalled thrashing about in the messy gap between the two, I began to see that my novel had stalled because it wasn’t the book I needed to write. The book I needed to write concerned the breakdowns between theory and practice.”